Blogging continues to grow in popularity for companies and individuals alike; whether writing or reading for personal or business reasons, blogs have become a common way of sharing thoughts and documenting news, but a way to generate SEO benefits. The latest statistics from WordPress support this, as it revealed that for last week alone, commencing Sunday 9th September, their global recorded number of posts totaled 9,583,366 and the people reading blogs accumulated to 806,579,835. With figures as high as these for just one week, is it any wonder that the majority of brands and businesses now incorporate blogging into their online PR strategy?
There are numerous reasons why writing a blog can be beneficial to companies. For one, blog posts are a great way of creating a buzz through social networks, which ultimately broadens reach and should increase visitors to the company website. If Facebook posts promoting the blog continually receive high levels of engagement, this can help improve visibility on the social network, as with any engaging content, due to the way Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm works. A frequent and consistent blog also helps to strengthen brand identity and bring personality to a company whilst promoting the businesses, its products or services and demonstrating its industry knowledge. Blogs hosted on the primary company website domain deliver relevant content to the target audience, but, perhaps more importantly from an SEO perspective, they are a great way of delivering fresh content to search engines. Not only will this encourage the search bots to crawl and re-crawl the website, the blog posts themselves may rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs), which will generate valuable traffic. Furthermore, if readers ‘Like’ your post it is likely they will share it and link to it, therefore increasing the SEO benefits for your website even further.
Creating a high quality blog post which stands out amongst the other thousands that are written each week requires a little bit of strategic thought and research. In order for it to flourish and help return maximum SEO value, it should be attractive and essentially work as bait for people to share and link to it; therefore, the topic must be interesting. It is always advantageous for it to have a unique angle and it should be promoted through all relevant channels, particularly social networks.
If your website doesn’t have a blog
In addition to hosting a blog on the company’s main domain, there are numerous platforms available, both free and paid for, where posts can be published, and there are still many advantages to this approach. Most blog sites offer the option of sharing through social media, popularity tracking and interactivity. With several of these sites now offering apps, the platforms allow posts to be created and uploaded instantly, regardless of the authors’ location. One of the SEO benefits to be gained from blogging on an external domain is pointing readers towards your website via links and therefore increasing your website’s backlink profile.
Always consider your target audience
It is easy to get carried away when passionate about the subject. Therefore, keeping your target audience in mind will help to focus the information included and bring structure to a blog post; be aware of the purpose of your post to demonstrate your authority on the topic so that people share and link to the content but remain true to your personal viewpoint and your writing style.
Glossary of terms
As a beginner to blogging and the SEO benefits it can bring, there is likely to be some jargon you’re not familiar with. Below are some general terms to help you on your way:
– Image ALT tag: This should describe what an image is, it is a key indicator for search engines, especially when it comes to image search;
– Anchor text: Where text on a page is linked to a webpage, just like ‘online PR’ is in the first paragraph of this article;
– CMS: Stands for Content Management System it is the interface for adding and editing website content;
– Directory: Simply a website which lists websites and blogs an industry relevant blog directory could be an effective way of generating traffic to your posts;
– RSS Feed: If a reader signs up to your feed, they are updated each time new content is added, allowing them to follow blogs with ease and encouraging repeat visits most common is RSS (rich site summary) or email feeds;
– Indexed: An indexed page is one that a search engine has found, read and stored it in its cache (search engines do not present live results, but rather those from its database), which ultimately means the search engine is able to serve the page in results;
– Meta description: Another significant indicator to search engines, this is often the snippet of text which appears in search engine results. As it is user-facing in the rankings it should describe the page content and act as a call to action;
– 301 Redirect: If a URL changes and is redirected to another address, a 301 redirect passes through a SEO benefits.
Blogging creates a relationship between the author and the reader, but also between the content and search engines. If high quality blogs are frequently produced, posts can be shared and linked to and traffic to your site can be increased, all of which assist in building authority for you and your business, in the minds of consumers and search engines.
Author: Erin Ablett
Courtesy of www.genuineseo.net